Remote meetings have long been crippled because participants cannot effectively convey or exchange important expressive information with the whole group. During a presentation, very often no one voices confusions or concerns, because each participant, unable to observe similar confusion on other participants' faces, typically thinks that he/she is the only one who has the question. Similarly, a speaker making a presentation typically does not know when to stop explaining, since he/she cannot readily observe reactions on the audience's faces. As a result, important questions and objections are often not raised, and too much time is spent explaining what is already understood.
Similarly, during a cross-cultural group meeting where group members cannot confidently interpret each other's demeanor, participants may feel cut off from the group, while leaders may have trouble controlling meeting pace and leading discussions effectively.
Some existing remote meeting tools enable participants to send verbal or nor-verbal messages to a leader or a moderator of the meeting. However, the messages are typically available only to the leader or the moderator, and other participants cannot use the messages to gauge the flow and tenor of the meeting. Accordingly, the participants typically cannot directly contribute to the group's dynamics as they would in a face-to-face meeting.
Some other existing remote meeting tools enable participants to communicate very limited expressive information. For example, participants may be able to show degrees of enthusiasm on a sliding scale through a handheld device, or sign up on a list indicating a desire to speak. However, the indications are often ambiguous. For example, a participant who expresses an intention to speak typically does not indicate whether the desire is to ask a question or to comment.
Remote meeting participants sometimes use text chat to augment telephone conferencing. However, two important limitations relate to the text chat. First, in many cases the text chat does not embrace the entire group, but serves as a sidebar conversation among a subset of the participants. Thus, the text chat serves more to fragment the meeting than to contribute to the overall dynamic of the group as a whole. Second, the text chat tends to be keyboard-intensive, requiring the same kind of attention and mental processing as the meeting's main discussion. Therefore, the text chat often competes with the main discussion of the meeting for the participants' mind share. When feelings run high or a topic under discussion calls for concentration, the participants generally abandon the text chat, or abandon the main discussion and simply vent feelings in the text chat. Third, as participation increases, the speed with which information in a chat window scrolls up and off the page increases, i.e., the more people contribute, the faster the contributions disappear, and the harder for the participants to follow the text chat. Accordingly, while a text chat window may be adequate for communicating reactions of a few participants among themselves, the text chat is inadequate for communicating expressive information among a large group of participants.
Remote meeting participants have also tried to use video transmission as a medium for expressing and exchanging reactions. However, video cameras do not provide feedback effectively because expressive information is typically communicated through body language and gestures. Even if network bandwidth and computer power are able to accommodate multiple video transmission, trying to watch an array of video windows proves to be inadequate. Meeting participants, unlike professional actors following a script, tend to focus on the subject of the meeting and the meeting itself, not on conveying a specific message through a camera. Accordingly, the nuances of body language that depend on physical proximity and eye contact simply cannot be conveyed through independent videos. In addition, trying to follow multiple video screens may be distracting and tiresome for participants.
Emote icons such as  and  have become common ways to communicate participant reactions in text interchanges, and many instant messaging products have “improved” the emote icons with color and other graphic detail. However, the improved versions of the emote icons typically lose clarity and readability. Additionally, the range of expression in emote icons is limited and the means for delivery (e.g., text chat) has the drawbacks described above.